Chapter 14: Developing Restful Awareness: Lessons in Energizing Individuals and Teams from the Micro-practices of a Yoga Class

Good morning everyone and welcome to today’s Hatha yoga class. As always, we will start with a short relaxation followed by breathing exercises. We will then move through our sequence of postures and finish with a full relaxation. Remember to listen to your body and honor its wishes. The most important consideration is that you leave the class experiencing a greater sense of well-being and energy than when you arrived.

This is a standard introduction to a Hatha yoga class, one of the most popular forms of the ancient practice. While in the West we have come to associate this form of yoga mainly with the practice of physical postures (or asanas), the actual aim of Hatha yoga – which translates from Sanskrit to “sun/moon” yoga – is to unite and integrate complementary energies (Ladkin, 2014). Hatha yoga is a practice dedicated to building mind-body awareness (Villate, 2015) and managing the individual participant’s energetic state. Through breathing and posture (asana) work, the practice of yoga is also increasingly being integrated into graduate school curricula and organizations around the world as a means of developing mindfulness skills among leaders (Sinclair, 2015).